1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to an apparatus and a method for determining a state of a counterpart communication apparatus in a communication apparatus. More particularly, the present invention relates to an apparatus and a method for determining a state of a counterpart without executing a separate program executed in order to determine a current state of a counterpart in a communication apparatus.
2. Description of the Related Art
Recently, a study for integration of a communication technology is in active progress, and IP Multimedia Subsystem (IMS) is one of the communication technology integration. The IMS is a technology for providing multimedia such as voice, audio, video, high capacity data, and the like. in combination through an Internet Protocol (IP). Examples of a service based on the IMS include Presence, Push-To-Talk (PTT) on Cellular (PoC), Voice over IP (VoIP), a file share service, or other similar service.
Here, the presence service is a most representative service of the IMS based services and denotes a service constantly informing an access state of a specific communication apparatus.
Here, in the presence service, a server that provides the presence service receives access state information of respective terminals from the plurality of terminals, and a specific terminal requests the presence server to transmit access state information of the terminals in order to detect access state of the terminals.
A representative method for using the presence service is a messenger service, which is an application program executed on a Personal Computer (PC) or a Personal Digital Assistant (PDA).
However, to use the presence service, the communication apparatus (PC or PDA) should always operate and a user of the communication apparatus should access a relevant application program in person.
That is, for the communication apparatus to detect a counterpart user' state, the communication apparatus should detect the state of a counterpart communication apparatus by having to operate an apparatus that can communicate with the counterpart communication apparatus and access an application program of the operated apparatus.
In addition, since the presence service is provided via a Graphic User Interface (GUI), the communication apparatus should have a screen of a predetermined size to use the service. Accordingly, manufacturing costs of the communication apparatus may increase.
Therefore, to solve the above problems, an apparatus and a method for detecting a counterpart's state without accessing a separate application program are required.
In addition, recently, a telephone mounting a large sized Liquid Crystal Display (LCD) may provide the service. However, in this case, since counterpart user's information viewed on one screen is limited, a user should use an exploring function or a scroll to view presence information of desired counterpart user. Therefore, when the number of registered counterpart users is large, it takes much time to explore the desired counterpart user.